Harnad

The Mechanistic Emergence of Symbol Grounding in Language Models

arXiv:2510.13796v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Symbol grounding (Harnad, 1990) describes how symbols such as words acquire their meanings by connecting to real-world sensorimotor experiences. Recent work has shown preliminary evidence that grounding may emerge in (vision-)language models trained at scale without using explicit grounding objectives. Yet, the specific loci of this emergence and the mechanisms that drive it remain largely unexplored.